song of the road

It is a bright sunny morning today. The sky is bright blue. It looks like it is going to be a hot day. For the last few days, it has been hot during the day but been windy and rainy in the evening and everything got cooled down by night. I woke up only a half hour earlier. I just got my morning cup of tea. The radio is playing by me. It is exasperating how many ads they play. I am yet to hear one song for last ten minutes. The days are lot less hectic without the tension of going to work and the long commute.

I woke up from a nightmare this morning. That persuaded me to write this morning. I saw that the three of us – my brother, my mom and I are there in Chicago. Please don’t ask me why Chicago, I have no wish to be in US. It must be my friendship with you all that made US the backdrop : ). Anyways my brother had torn his one good formal trousers while going for an interview. He got the interview postponed with some excuse. I was saying we would go and buy a new one the next day as it was Saturday. I think the money was tight. For some reason my mom was completely against it. My brother was silent. I was trying to convince her saying I knew stores where we could buy a good one for cheap. We would take her with us so she can stop us from overspending. My mom was angry and saying that my brother shouldn’t have wasted his money on a stylish overcoat and now we could not afford to buy new trousers. Again I don’t know why anyone with one formal trouser will buy an overcoat. : ) To my mom’s defense, the overcoat seemed quite luxurious and unnecessary. I kept on getting angrier and angrier. I started yelling that she lets choto masi (our aunt who is mom’s youngest sister and a great favorite of mine) buy unnecessary things but has a problem with buying the basic necessity for us. She didn’t react much and held her ground in her infuriating way. I got in to a rage and shouted at her asking her why she doesn’t pretend to worship God and live in the Himalayas like many widows do, if she hates us so much. It is where I woke up.

The thing that I said was very bad. I am surprised with the dream. My mom will never stop us buying something we need, specially clothes. She does get mildly irritated with my brother’s overspending at times. My brother doesn’t always over spend to be fair. But he likes very good things. He will go without for some time and then buy the top of the line of whatever he wanted. He bought a very good and very expensive camera recently. The one I had bought long back for him was very expensive at that time too. Then he bought a very expensive keyboard for his fiancée. He bought that very good cell phone for me which got stolen. When I got my first job after graduation, the first thing he wanted was a good music system. We spent lots of time choosing one. Then I didn’t have enough cash to buy it. So we got dad to buy it with solemn promises from me to pay back in installments. I didn’t pay at all. : ) Dad also didn’t mention it once. I guess he was okay to buy it for us, only didn’t want to say so verbally or we might make a habit of it. That is a topic for another blog.

When my brother got his first job, he bought the best motorbike available in India. He had to pay installments for very long. Even the car he chose for me, he fell in love with it when he test drove it. For its size, it’s quite expensive though that is mainly due to the fact that automatic transmission cars are not so common in India. He is not selfish. He doesn’t have many things. But what he has and what he gives to people he loves are always a little too expensive. He bought a pen for me once as a festival gift which was again a very exclusive one. He got my mom to buy him a bicycle with sever gears which was though very good but rather unnecessarily so. He had majot trouble finding a mechanic who could repair the cycle. Then at the end he took out the gears. We made much fun of that. : ) The list goes on. Last time when he came home he blew mom away by mentioning that he wants to buy a small private airplane and learn to fly. From our economic background, people never even dream about buying a plane. Most people would aspire to a Mercedes at the maximum and a luxurious house will be there in many dreams. My mom is very scared; especially she doesn’t want him to try anything so dangerous. He wants to travel across India on his bike and I am sure will do it soon without much support from home, I might add.

It is surprising where he got this propensity for adventure and buying the best. My dad was always practical and a person who always managed and tried to belong. I am a little like that. My mom nowadays is very scared about everything. She will ask me to cross the road carefully and get tensed about that. : ) But she used to be far braver when we all were younger. I got a few chance to travel across India organized by our schools when I was in high school in Jamshedpur. Everyone else’s mom used to go crazy with worry to let their teenage kids especially girls alone for 15 days. We used to be a gang of 50 kids of 30 boys and 20 girls with 4 teachers accompanying us. My mom was super cool. She would tell me there was no need for me to run for a telephone at every opportunity and report my safety. She knows I am an intelligent girl and I would stay safe and manage very well. I could call a few times but I was to enjoy fully without half my mind at home. I guess she wanted me to enjoy the freedom I was getting and which she couldn’t dream of having when she was may age. Though later she told she used to be very worried. But each time she sent me away with a smile and no advice. What surprises me more is that the whole family used to miss me a lot and they told me so. One would think not having a teenager at home for 15 days would be a welcome break. My dad would try to cheer up everybody by taking them to movies and he bought my brother a carrom board (a game which is a little similar to pool in a small scale). Making this kind of effort was a little uncharacteristic of him. Anyway to come back it must have been my mom and her really rebellious siblings’ genes which has made my brother so.

On the other hand it could also be that my dad could not be adventurous simply because he had to be responsible for first his very big and poor family and then us. Per my mom, he was very wild before marriage and she had it from good sources. I think he caught my brother smoking pot once but just let it go. He did love to gamble in a very small scale. I remember him playing poker or some such card games for little money and enjoying it way too much. For some reason, dad used to win a lot and so used to lose partners rapidly. He would give back the money won after the game to appease the other players. Once he started to buy lotto tickets. My brother and I made fun of it mercilessly and he stopped after a while. He used to watch the game show “who wants to be a millionaire” with such a gleam in his eyes. I guess he would have tried to go were he a little younger. He was such a lovable big bear of a guy.

I wish again and again, I had told him how much I loved him. I think he knew. He loved me especially so very very much. He was more friends with my brother. But I had his love for almost no reason. Well, you never earn your parents’ love. But my brother was more there for him but we all know I had the unconditional lion’s share of my dad’s love. Maybe it is only because I came first in to their lives. Like my mom loves my brother more. She loves me like crazy too. She sees herself in me and that is why she is so worried about me. All the pain and deprivation and loss of dreams she has gone through as a woman child and then as a woman, she fights fiercely to protect me from all of it. That is why she so zealously worked to make me financially independent. She rather wanted me to be good in studies and sports and fine arts and happily married with a kid and financially stable of course. Not all of it worked out. But I think we both can live with what I have become. On the other hand she is much relaxed about my brother. She has a confidence about him. She says they fight more because they are more alike. My brother is looking more and more an exact replica of my dad everyday. My dad had that same confidence about me and was more worried about my brother. Even though he really is more orthodox than my mom is, he was practical enough to accept my not getting married and was far more okay with it.
  
Now let me talk about the other character in my dream.  My complaining about my choto masi, that is super ridiculous. I seriously love her. I adore her. She is someone very original. She is good in academics. She did her masters in Economics. She could solve difficult mathematical problems when we were in college with amazing confidence and ease. She sings really beautifully. She paints very well. She used to dabble in pottery. She could play most musical instruments instinctively. Anything arty and she is effortlessly good. All that my mom wanted me to be, she was, without any effort on her part. Well, except the money part and we both are screwed up romantically. : )

For music, she put in lots of effort and practice. When she came to Calcutta from their village for her masters, she already had at least 20 years of learning music behind her. To get in to professional singing, she joined classes of an established professional singer of that time. That stupid lady made her sing in extraordinarily high scales in a screaming kind of a way. Her voice cracked and she fell sick. In fact she was quite unhappy with her teacher pretty early. She told my granny that she feared that her voice would go if she continues with her. But my granny who was so patient, so intelligent and so nice, didn’t pay any heed to her in this instance. The problem is that though chotomasi is phenomenally talented and is actually very nice, can have many tantrums and can be often unreasonable in a conventional sense. So my granny took this as one more of her quirkiness and asked her to stay at it. I guess even chotomasi thought that the teacher must know better and she let it go and kept singing in that stupid way. Well, she fell sick and the voice went. She can’t sing higher scales without her voice cracking up any more. Bye bye career in music. Isn’t it ironical how the person who loves us most can sometimes cause us the most grievous harm? We really can’t blame granny for it, my masi should have stood up for herself or continued the discussion with her. We all make so many mistakes ourselves that we don’t know when our mothers are right and when they are not. And then again, we all make mistakes and suffer losses, there is not much point blaming any one for it. But for a small coincidence, the mistake could have been solely my masi’s.

My masi had many interruptions during her studies. In many ways she is singularly unlucky. She studied at home for the first twelve years. Just when she was all ready for her 12th standard exam which is what you pass here before going to college for undergraduate studies, the rules suddenly changed against home study. She had to lose two years and stay with my other aunt to go to school and then give the same exam for which she has been ready for 3 years now.

She has a dark complexion. Which came up as a reason again and again as to why she could not married in an arranged marriage scenario. Idiots after idiots rejected her. I will some time find a photo of hers and post here. She really is very pretty. Many guys were attracted to her. Friendships between opposite sex were not encouraged at that time. Still there used to be fights among guys about wooing her. But none of those suitors were good enough. Either they were uneducated or financially no good. Plus they were no match for the fire ball that my masi is. It is incredible why none of matches that our whole extended family searched for her worked out. Eventually she married very late to a person of her own choice, a cousin of ours. This guy actually was a match for her in every way and was just as crazy and as talented as she was. The guy was a brilliant young doctor who was a few years younger to her. But the brilliant doctor who we knew from our childhood and I hero worshipped liked crazy, turned to politics while doing his masters to become a neurosurgeon. He always used to help people and had a very compassionate nature. He is so very beautiful. He comes from a rich family. Like my grandfather ruined his life in religion, this guy did the same in politics. I loved his so very much.

My masi gave up the teaching job she was doing half heartedly to be with him. They got married and she had a baby son. Again bad luck struck them. The kid was not well from birth. There was some lack of oxygen for a while when he was born. He was never well and he lived only for a year and a few months. He was admitted to the hospital at the end. My masi had just gone out for a drink of water at the end of a long bad night. When she came back to the bed, he had passed away. I don’t know how she did bear it. She told about it to us normally enough. I was so stunned, I didn’t cry at all. My mom was vehemently against her marrying that cousin of ours. (As was all of her extended family and some cut her off completely too.) But when the kid was born, she felt things would work out for her and my mom was so happy. When the kid died, my mom didn’t say anything. Just a few days back, she was telling me that was one of the reasons why my mom lost her mind. I too realized that my mom’s first breakdown was very soon after that. There were many many reasons for my mom’s illness but this seemed one of the triggers.

Do you think this was the end of my masi’s grief? Wait, no. She had already joined her husband in politics. But she wasn’t as keen and I would say not as blind to the faults of the party. I think with nothing much to occupy her, she started taking too much care of her husband. This is the time we lost touch as we were too busy with my mom and my dad’s voluntary retirement and his major problems in settling down and my mom’s second attack. So I am not quite clear what happened but they separated. I even heard that her husband had hit her a few times. My hero died. I mourn him still. Eventually they got divorced. He had started to live together with someone else already and I think now is married to her. My masi after a while took another teaching job where she got promoted and was to live as a superintendent with the girls in the girls’ hostel. We thought the company of young girls would help her. Again I don’t know exactly why she gave up that job or she might have been fired too.

When we went home last time after our father’s death, she came to meet us. She must be about 47-48 but she doesn’t look any older than me. With so much gone on her life, you can’t see it at all in her face or her eyes. She was wearing jeans and a plain cheap t-shirt and she looked like a friend of mine. At a pinch she can be passed off as a college student. She now lives as a paying guest or sometimes in women’s hostels. She has no employment or wish for any, I guess. I think she has some money from her parents but I don’t know how that is going to last her. She manages in a really really small sum of money. Her life is completely barren. She was saying she nowadays loves to watch movies in a cinema hall as she loves the feel of crowd around her. I wanted to cry after hearing that. She used to sing so well. Our houses used to be full of beautifully made and painted clay vases of hers. Her room used to be full of her painting. She never got to learn painting or pottery formally. My brother who doesn’t like her particularly was awestruck by a painting she made for him long after she had stopped all that. And now she craves the companionship of an anonymous crowd of a movie hall. She doesn’t sing, doesn’t paint, and doesn’t sculpt but she smiles just as brightly. Do you now wonder why my mom wants me to marry and have a kid at any cost? She is not taken in by my masi’s smile. She understands her strike.

The dream also reminded me of another small incident back in my childhood. In my mom’s village we had an annual festival called “Durgapuja”. It is by far the Bengali community’s largest festival. It is very easily a parallel to Christmas in terms of joy. So we all used to go there during this autumn festival. Most of our cousins used to turn up too. Actually my brother and I were keener to stay home at Jamshedpur to enjoy with our friends whereas understandably mom wanted to be with her parents and her childhood companions – her sisters. So we used to fight about it and go to my mom’s village once in a while during the festival.

The festival goes on for ten days with the main event being four days long. Everyone buys new clothes for these days. Our parents did so too. My mom bought dress materials for me and my chotomasi. The first one she chose was for me and I loved it a lot. It had lovely blue printed stripes on a dark grey background and was soft cotton. I am doing a poor job describing the material. Then she chose another one for my masi which was very good too. It had a pink base with blocks of yellow, blue and other vibrant colored squares appliquéd on it. She stitched them both. I knew the grey one was for me. When we went there all my aunts were getting the clothes out after lunch in the shady sitting room while it was blindingly sunny outside. There wasn’t any jealousy or competition involved as far as I could feel. I was about 15 then. We were all admiring each others clothes. My mom brought out the two dresses she got for us and asked my masi which one she wanted. Before I realized what was happening she chose the grey one. My mom gave it to her. We were both approximately same size. I told my mom then that I thought that the grey one was for me. My mom asked me to keep quite and was a bit embarrassed I guess. My masi immediately offered to take the other one but my mom asked her to keep the one she has chosen. I was angry and ran away. I wept hidden in the terrace. My mom came and explained that it wasn’t nice to be selfish. Because my masi had a complex about being dark, we must let her have the color she is more comfortable with. But I was inconsolable. I was not much for dresses at all but had somehow got attached to the grey one. I wanted to prance about wearing that one. I kept on saying “I don’t want any thing generally. This one time I want that dress, why can’t I have it?” My mom explained for a while and then she got impatient and told me to stop crying and left. If I kept on crying chotomasi would be very embarrassed about the gift. So I shut up after a while. Chiku (my brother) was 9 then and he was worried and was uncomfortably stalking around. I remember his frowning and asking why am I bothering about a stupid dress. He was saying “you don’t care about dresses, you care about books. So why are you crying? Please don’t”. I promised to myself I will never wear the pink dress. Needless to say I did wear it a few days later when my mom asked me to and all my cousins chorused in wanting to see in the lovely pink dress. In some ways my relatives are so good. I was angry and depressed for long. It was a silly whim but it cut me deep. A few years later when I came to Calcutta for my studies, I saw that my masi has given away that dress to a cousin. They both had not maintained the dress at all and it was looking like a rag. My mom had maintained my pink one beautifully and it was still as good as new after two years. I don’t know when it happened but I fell in love with my pink dress and cherished it for very long time afterwards.

I will finish off today’s long epistle with one more small memory of Durgapuja at my mom’s house. They used to sacrifice two goats on two days of the ceremony. They would tie the poor creature on a particular iron stand and cut its head with one swoop of a huge moon shaped blade. Barbaric, I know. This has stopped at most places of India now. PETA is quite active here and in general people are more towards stopping such practices. But it used to go on then and a lot goes on now too, in the name of tradition. It used to seem terribly barbaric to us. They would actually put the severed head on a clay plate and the men would dance around it. Chiku also had to dance there a few times and I know this is among the things he has not forgiven my mom for. I used to try to hide and avoid being there when the sacrifice happened. But my mom and specially my one uncle would force us to go as apparently watching this would build character. I say, f*** character but I wasn’t so confident then. We used to hate going so much. I would shut my eyes tight at the right moment or try to hide behind some adult. But my uncle or someone would push me to the front for a better look see. They would say that is the way life is and no way should we run away. It is another story how scared life has turned that uncle’s son and the uncle himself. But he used to love me lots and used to tell me the most fabulous stories. I loved his son so much. I met him last when he was about 2-3 years old and he would be clinging on my hip all the time. I hope things work out for that sweet kid. He has just finished his MBA but facing problems landing a job. Anyway it was then my cousin, my childhood hero, my masi’s future hubby who stood up for me and told it was utter nonsense. There was no need for us to witness the sacrifice. It was only his saying that validated my hatred for that violence. And that year he took all us kids with him to other places when the sacrifice was supposed to happen.

When we are young, we never do know how future is going to unfold for us. Well, we don’t know now either. In the story of my masi, I cry so much for the loss of that much potential in that doomed couple. He was such a compassionate person and used to love us younger cousings like his own siblings and take genuine interest in us.He was brave and naughty and funny. He said the bad words first among us. He slipped me pills to cure my sudden fever so I could go with him to his house which I was looking forward to from very long. Though the pill didn’t work and I had a raging fever the next day. How sweetly he kept his hand on my forehead and told me he would surely take me another time. There was another cousin who was more near my age who was to go too but she gave it up because I couldn’t go. The trip meant even more to her. She is another story waiting to be told another time. I wish I were more in touch with them all. Anyway I wanted to be like my hero cousin so much. Of course I don’t any more. But it hurts to lose you, khokon-dada. It hurts so much.

Well, my working from home is going well. I have bought lots of fruits yesterday. I am planning to make a sumptuous stir fry with lots of vegetables for lunch today. Also there is the plan to join gym again coming Monday. Hopefully I will repair my health a bit more.

Love you all my lovely friends.